Maybe it's because I've had to endure all the manufactured nonsense of Father's Day recently, but there does seem to be a lot of stuff about dads in the air these days. It could be fallout from the explosion of books for boys going on at the moment. There are now loads of books about dads, books by dads, books for dads ... Cosmic manages to be all three, while remaining very much a comic romp for kids. We men are always freaked out by the moment when we wake up one day and realise that we have turned into our own dads. For Liam, the narrator of Cosmic, that day has come rather sooner than he expected. He's only 13 but is already 6ft tall and growing a beard. He is constantly being mistaken for an adult, which can be both fun and terrifying, often at the same time - such as when he impersonates a teacher, or gets the chance to test-drive a Porsche. Most fun and scary of all, he wins the chance to go to what he thinks is the world's most exciting theme park in China - but in order to go there he has to pretend to be a dad and persuade one of his friends to go along as his child.

Once there he discovers that Infinity Park isn't a theme park at all - it's a training site for the first children into space. Things rapidly get way out of Liam's control and he winds up on a spaceship as the only "adult" with several kids relying on him to get them back down to Earth. He has to draw on all the life skills he's learned playing computer games to get them through, but when even Florida Kirby, the girl he has brought along to pretend to be his daughter, starts treating him like an adult, he rapidly learns more than he ever wanted to about the treacherousness, unreliability and sheer bloody-mindedness of kids. He has a self-help manual he's nicked off his parents - How to Talk to Teens - and while noticing several obvious ruses his dad has tried on him, he concludes, like so many thousands of parents before him, that the book is utterly useless.

This book, though, is great. As one would expect from father-of-seven Frank Cottrell Boyce (the award-winning author of Millions and Framed), it's funny and engaging and in the end rather moving (though not in a horrible Hollywood "what have we learned today, children?" kind of way). Having to pretend to be a parent makes Liam realise just what his own parents mean to him. And it also makes him see kids in a new light. Only one adult can go with them and the kids need to vote on it. Liam nearly blows his chances when he proves to be better than all of them on a videogame installed on the ship. "That's the scary thing about kids. They will vote to go into space with someone dangerously useless if it means they get a longer go on the PlayStation."